


Stars

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-21 10:30:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melody Pond lives a cardboard cut-out life.</p><p>For tardis_coral's prompt at the Guns & Curls ficathon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stars

In a dank room on twentieth-century earth, Melody Pond has as much of a childhood as she ever manages to achieve. It is half a girl’s bedroom, a closet with exposed pipes and plumbing that only occasionally works, decorated with bits of pieces she’s stolen from the world of real people. The pink quilt once belonged to a girl down the road, and the rug to the library where she first heard them read of magic carpets. There are toys too delicate for seven-year-old hands, beautifully crafted porcelains from the antique shop on the hill. She is small, and can climb into places no one would think to guard.

There are pictures on the dresser; one she’s had with her forever, and others that they’ve taken as a gift to her. It’s almost, but not quite, like the pictures of families she sees in magazines.

There’s a lamp someone had thrown on a rubbish heap—just a little bit of rewiring and it had been good as new—and an old pitcher she found in a field. Sometimes she likes to pretend that it belonged to her grandmother, though she doesn’t know for sure that she ever had one. There are carnival toys and raggedy stuffed animals and cheap prints that she’s stolen, scattered throughout her room. She has a dollhouse that another girl cried to lose, and a top that she won from a boy in a bet. He cried, too. Even her furniture belonged to someone else—the children that lived there before her, the sad-eyed boys and girls she watched leave so the Silence could make this her home.

Melody lives a life outside, taking bits and pieces from the real people to try and patch together her cardboard dress-up life. She only owns one real thing, one thing that is hers and hers alone; her stars. Her first memory, silver six-pointed stars and twisty shining planets twirling above her head; soft happy voices singing in her head, gentle hands and gentle eyes. As soon as her chubby fingers are able, she steals some tinfoil from the drug store down the road, and Mister Harper gives her some fishing line and a twisty bit of metal from his car. She finds some scissors in the ancient arts and crafts bin and, with careful precision, recreates her stars.

They hang in the corner of her room, spinning and twinkling, a reminder that she is a real person too.

 _the battle is won but the child is lost_

Melody sheds her name like a worn-out skin, because Melody Pond was just a child in a legend, but for River Song, the stars are real.

  


  


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